Frank James Low

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Frank James Low, (born Nov. 23, 1933, Mobile, Ala.—died June 11, 2009, Tucson, Ariz.), American astronomer and physicist who helped lead the development of infrared astronomy. In 1961, while working at Texas Instruments, he devised an instrument that detected and measured infrared, or heat, radiation by means of gallium-doped germanium (a semiconductor). The next year he went to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, W.Va., to test the instrument, called a bolometer, for observing the infrared radiation emitted by celestial objects. He then pioneered the use of airborne observatories for taking telescopes with infrared detectors above most of the atmosphere’s water vapour, which absorbs infrared radiation. Low and his colleagues discovered that Jupiter and Saturn emit more energy than they receive from the Sun and found regions of star formation within immense clouds of dust and gas. Low was the chief technologist of NASA’s Infrared Astronomy Satellite, which was launched in 1983 and carried out the first infrared survey of the sky from space. He later made critical contributions to the design of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared observatory launched in 2003. Low received a B.S. (1955) from Yale University and a Ph.D. (1959) in physics from Rice University, Houston. After his work at Texas Instruments and the NRAO, Low joined (1965) the faculty of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, where he worked until his retirement in 1996. From 1966 to 1979 he was also a member of the faculty of Rice University. Low founded (1967) his own company, Infrared Laboratories, Inc., Tucson, Ariz., to supply infrared detectors. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1974.